Sylla - 29th January 2015

Years ago we used to play a game called "Republic of Rome". It was a pretty typical Avalon Hill game with rules that read like a legal text with sections, subsections and exceptions. It featured a interesting mixture of competition for political supremacy and having to work together to defeat crisis after crisis.

Sylla has the same theme, but with a modern approach to the game mechanisms. First though you have to get your brain past the oddity that the game starts during the Roman Republic yet features Christians. Mmm. Let's just forget the title and move on.

The game features a selection of characters - senators, merchants, legionaries, slaves and vestals. Each provides the ability to buy buildings and most have a special ability too. The catch is that you only get to use the character once per turn - so you need to plan ahead, which characters will buy buildings and which will you save for later?

There are a number of tracks representing the state of Rome - a large part of the game is being seen to be working to keep things from getting too bad. In true cynical political simulation it's not what you've achieved it's what you appear to have done.

There are also a variety of events that need to be defeated and great works to build.

Given that this was our first game we probably didn't get our balance right. Famine fear (too much Tzolk'in?) lead us to bid high for famine reducing buildings, but it never got to the point that it made that much of a difference. Andy went heavily into merchants to boost his income. David went for senators to give him political clout and Kieron went for a more balanced selection. Early on, Andy and Kieron used a lot of their characters to buy buildings, where as David saved his to use later in the turn to counter events and gain bonuses. Andy saved his money to influence a couple of key votes in order to gain high victory points.

Towards the end of the game two of our tracks reached crisis state. This gave David a large boost as he had earned the most political tokens for countering disasters (even though this had clearly been totally ineffective).

For the last couple of turns we all realised just how important (and clever) the event defeating mechanism was and there was some delightful bluff and brute force to gain maximum benefit.

Final score was David 83, Kieron 79 and Andy 72. It will be interesting to play again with a better idea of how it all fits together.

Village - 14 January 2015

Five of us played Village this week - using the Village Pub expansion to allow a fifth player but without the complications of the Pub and Brewery options.  Andy played the market as usual and attempted to collect all the green resources to stop anyone else selling, but there were still some available and Kieron played the market as well.  James went travelling, again as usual, David took holy orders, and Stuart a little bit of everything.  Final scores saw David win with 42 points, Kieron close behind on 41, James probably 37 (after reaching 41 too but we may have awarded a chronicle bonus in error), then Andy just squeezing ahead of Stuart with 29 against 28.

Tzolk'in - 7th January 2015

Five of us at David's and a return to a favourite Tzolk'in. Kieron had brought along the expansion pack, providing pieces and additional cards for a fifth player. It also introduced two additional features. The first of these was a set of cards determining special rules for each epoch. We took a look at these and there was an (almost) unanimous decision to leave them out. The general feeling was that it risked driving all the players towards the same strategy which felt wrong.

We did however play with the second feature - each player has a special ability and our attempts to guess as to which ability would be most effective were spectacularly wrong...

David had reduced corn costs for worker placement. This seemed to be quite powerful, but only saved a single corn on each worker placement phase, so it probably saved a couple of trips to collect corn overall.

Andy had reduced research costs. This meant he played the research track more than usual, but again didn't appear to have a great impact.

James' ability sounded amazing. For a corn he could take the action one ahead of where he was. For some reason though he couldn't make that much use of it. Maybe that's one you'd have to play with a few times to get the hang of it as it does disrupt the tempo.

Kieron's ability was to pick up a worker when he placed two or more. Again it sounded good, but the circumstances where he could use it were limited.

And then there was Stu's. His ability let him link pairs of gears. When he took a worker off one gear, he had the option of taking the action from the equivalent place on the paired gear. And boy, did he use it well.

Stu developed a strong resource intensive strategy, helped along by his abililty to switch gears, and soon he was buying lots of buildings. The rest of us never really got going.

Final score:

Stu: 92, James: 61, Kieron: 56, David: 41, Andy: 38

Quatre Bras - 2 January 2015

To mark the 200th anniversary since the Battle of Waterloo, Jonathan has planned a sequence of Napoleonic games.  We played the first of these yesterday - Quatre Bras.  Kieron and (another) Jonathan took the roles of the French, James the Allies with post-lunch assistance from Adrian.

We faced a roughly 16x4 feet table with Quatre Bras and the crossroads near the Allied table edge.  With troops hidden in the woods and occupying the town, the Allies initial deployment was on top of the hill to the left of QB and along the road between the town and woods.  With the exception of some cavalry, the bulk of the French army came on directly opposite the cross roads and QB.

The Allies were hampered by a great deal of second-rate troops and a series of Aides-de-Camp with shorter life expectancies than drummers with Spinal Tap.  When the concentration of French troops was clear, new orders were sent to the right flank so they could reinforce the town and attack the French flank.  Over the course of 7 or 8 turns, the Allied lost a dozen ADCs, and so the orders did not get through in time to have impact, and by nightfall, the French had occupied QB and had pushed up the hill, defeating Brunswick, Dutch and Belgian troops.

A minor highlight of the Allies was the hardy unit stationed in the building near the French table edge which took potshots at the passing French and defeated two units who tried to storm the building.  The lowlight was the charge of the Brunswick lancers, defeated by a French unit that was successful in forming a hasty square.

So a victory for the French but good fun for everyone.  Thanks again to Jonathan for all the painting and running the game for us.  Next stop Ligny...

Peloponnes & Alea Iacta Est - 1 January 2015

First games night of 2015 (fifteen! how did that happen?) saw five us gathering for a couple of old favourites.  James got the remaining Peloponnes expansions for Christmas and so ran through the full set of options open to us, but it was all too much for some and we only played the Trade cards on top of what we usually play.  More next time...

We did play with a couple of new civilisations in the deck and David drew Antioch, which protected him from all disasters, but at the cost of losing one population each turn.  Kieron was the only one who took advantage of the Trade option, so not a very different game from usual.  Final scores saw David win (again!) with Prestige/Population scores on 34/30, then Adrian 33/27, James 24/24, Kieron 32/18 and Andy 17/12.

Plenty of time left for Alea Iacta Est which James, with some strong Fortuna counters, won with 48 points, followed by David with 41, Kieron 38, Adrian 29 and Andy 28.